The perfect voting system?

It's difficult to get an election right. However free and fair you aspire you be, there will always be accusations of fraud, counting mistakes and "hanging chads". But is there a way to get things right every time? Is there a way to give people trust that their vote will be counted correctly and fairly?

David Bismark, a voting systems designer, thinks so, and gave a talk at TEDGlobal 2010 on an electronic voting system that he's co-developed which contains a simple and reliable method of verifying the count. "We need to talk about elections in a new way; we need to talk about transparency and verifiability," said Bismark.

"Even if the idea of an election is perfect, running one is a big project, and big projects are messy", he said. "These systems should not only be impossible to cheat but they should tally the election correctly and prove that the tally is correct."

The system outlined by Bismark consists of a ballot form, an encrypted 2D barcode, and a series of computers to do the grunt encryption work. The voting form comes with a perforation down the middle, with one side displaying a list of candidates in a random order, and the other showing the tick-boxes and unique-identifying barcode.

Once a person has marked their choice, the form is torn in half and the candidate list is shredded in the booth, leaving just your marks and the encrypted barcode that contains the information about what the boxes mean. That means that you're the only person who knows how you voted. The poll station workers can then scan your form to get the data, and it can be stored centrally. It can even be published on a website so that anyone can verify the results.

Once scanned, you can take your marks on paper home as a receipt, and you can then compare it at any time to the website's version. Once the election is complete, the meanings of the votes -- what each check-mark matches up to -- get decrypted in several steps, spread among different organisations, and the plain-text, countable votes can then be tallied. The decryption process can be spread among the current government, the opposition, the United Nations or even governments of other countries.

As a result, it isn't possible for any single person, or single organisation, to change your vote because then the other steps of the process wouldn't work. It would require every organisation along the process, some of which would be opposing each other, and some of which would be independent observers, to conspire together for fraud to occur.

"Elections should be verifiable but secret", says Bismark, who believes that this system could solve the much of the world's electoral woes, assuming sufficient resources and specialists are available to perform the decryption process. You can read much more about the proposed system on Bismark's website, and the video of the talk is due to go public on the web around November, when the US will hold its mid-term elections. Sit tight until then.